The RIAA may win its battle against the unlicensed music discovery service …

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The RIAA's unending game of cat-and-mouse with unlicensed music distribution sites has taken an abrupt turn with the introduction of Opentape, a purportedly unrelated open-source clone of Muxtape that the RIAA got shut down last week. Opentape's appearance demonstrates that the RIAA has opened a much larger can of worms than it may have expected when it convinced Muxtape's owners to take the site offline.

Muxtape debuted in April this year as a revitalization of the mixtape from days gone by. Instead of fumbling with analog tapes that can be shared only with a single friend, Muxtape allowed users to upload playlists of MP3s and share a streaming version of their musical tastes with the world (outside of some clever hackery, listeners couldn't download the tracks). Muxtape's simple website allowed listeners to stream a playlist's tracks and offered links to commercial stores like Amazon to purchase legitimate copies.

Muxtape's biggest problem is that it hadn't licensed any of the rights it needed to store and stream all the copyrighted works it was hosting, leading to the RIAA's pulling the plug on Muxtape last week.

Opentape has debuted rather quickly with a set of features that are strikingly similar to Muxtape's. Opentape may pose a much greater problem for the RIAA, however, as it's offered as a downloadable software package that can run on most modern web hosts, requiring only Apache 1.x and PHP5. To make matters worse from the RIAA's perspective, Opentape offers direct links to the MP3s that a user choses to upload, instead of links to legitimate music outlets.

Opentape's simple UI allows for clicking a song to stream it,
or clicking on direct MP3 links to download

While Opentape professes to have nothing to do with Muxtape, Valleywag points out various details that paint a different picture. Opentape.fm is powered by the same Tumblr service as Muxtape's blog, and the address for Opentape.fm's domain registration is that of IAC CEO Barry Diller, under whom Muxtape's founder worked for at video sharing site Vimeo.

Whether Opentape truly has anything to do with Muxtape, the RIAA now has a whole new set of headaches. By striking down a centralized, streaming-only music discovery service like Muxtape, the RIAA has apparently inspired the release of a simple, decentralized software package for easily streaming and sharing music from any host and URL across the globe, with nary an affiliate link for a legitimate music shop in sight.

Oops.

We went hands on with Opentape by installing it on a personal server, completing the setup, and uploading a few songs. For obvious reasons, we don't think sharing our Opentape with you is such a good idea, but we can at least confirm that setting it up is ridiculously simple. After uploading a small directory to your compatible host of choice, simply visiting it in a browser will prompt you to create a password for logging in and editing attributes like the tape's title and song order. A browser-based upload tool works for uploading songs in a pinch, but since you probably still have your FTP app open, you might as well drag and drop to make things simple.

Overall, Opentape 0.1 is a successful piece of music discovery software. Muxtape may have drawn the RIAA's ire for hosting music without licensing agreements and presumably ignoring DMCA takedown notices, but Opentape's release looks to have set the RIAA up for a new set of headaches.